Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly, I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I'm going to talk about the irony of the generalist. This episode is inspired by a tweet that one of my students shared with me in our Slack room. I'll read the tweet to you. I won't read the guy's name because I feel like throwing him under the bus. And as I read this, I want you to be attentive to your internal reaction. Here's the tweet. I'm now looking for work. Please hire me. WordPress, PHP, design, anything webby really. Does that make you want to hire this person? Does that make you want to recommend this person to someone? Can you think of anyone that you would recommend? Talk to this person for something webby. This tweet is a perfect example of the irony of taking a generalist position. A tweet like this comes from a desperate place. This poor guy is probably looking for work, needs the money, is feeling desperate. And even if he's not, that's how it comes across, which is the problem. So on the one hand, in his mind, he's casting a really wide net in hopes of catching some straggler fish with this huge net. But to the person who reads it, it creates what Blair Enns calls the stench of desperation. People don't want to work with someone who's desperate for money. It indicates that they're not that great. If they were in demand, they would be more attractive as a potential partner. It's kind of like if you're walking past a restaurant and no one's in there, you're unlikely to want to go in and sit down. Whereas if you walk by a restaurant that has a line out the door or is perhaps doing a busy business inside, be a little bit more interesting to say, hey, all these people like it, maybe I'll like it too. So I'm going to suggest a different tweet because I understand that people do get desperate for work. They get into cash flow crunches. They get into the famine cycle of a feast famine or they get into a famine valley of a feast famine cycle. Imagine, if you will, that the tweet was like this. And again, be sensitive to your internal reaction to a tweet like this. Anybody have a dentist with a terrible website looking for introductions? Thanks in advance. I don't know about you, but my reaction to that, the inescapable reaction to that for me is that I immediately think of my dentist. And I think, huh, I don't know if I've ever been on his website, but I'll bet you it's terrible. Maybe I pull it up and I see that it's terrible. And now I'm thinking about maybe introducing this web person to my dentist and just letting them run with it. And if enough people have a similar reaction to that, this person could end up having a whole bunch of prospecting phone calls. And maybe nothing will come of it, but maybe something would come of it. And I think there are two big differences with my version of the tweet from the original, the actual tweet. Mine, I think, certainly does not sound as desperate and perhaps doesn't sound desperate at all. But it certainly doesn't say, hey, I'm desperate for work. You could take it a million ways. Maybe he's just interested in working with dentists now or who knows? You don't really know. The other thing is that it triggers a Rolodex moment. I define a Rolodex moment as a situation where you are talking with someone and you say something that triggers them almost irresistibly to mentally flip through their Rolodex of contacts and think of someone that they should introduce you to. So this is one thing that a generalist position will never do because if you say, hey, does anybody know someone who needs a website? It doesn't trigger a Rolodex moment for me because I don't know who needs a website. I know thousands of people. I'm connected to over 500 people on LinkedIn. I'm connected to thousands of people on Twitter and thousands of people on Facebook. I don't know who needs a website. That's something that is not knowable to me without doing some research. But if you say to me, oh, I help dentists with their digital experience or with their website or with their whatever, uniforms, it doesn't matter, immediately I'm going to think, oh, what dentists do I know? And it just so happens probably most people in the U.S. know a dentist. But it doesn't have to be dentists. It could be anything. I'm just using that as an example. In fact, I went to this guy's website who authored the original tweet, and right at the top he's got a case study of a restaurant-related WordPress thing that he did. So his tweet could have been, hey, does anybody know a mom and pop or does anybody know someone who runs a local

restaurant that has a terrible website. I'll bet you, dear listener, you are right now thinking of your favorite local mom and pop restaurant and wondering if they have a terrible website or you know they have a terrible website. And perhaps the next step that you would take would be to introduce this guy to that proprietor. Or maybe you would research him a little bit to see if he seemed like he knew what he was doing before making an introduction. But you'd be taking action. You wouldn't have just scrolled past this tweet shaking your head. So I'm not just talking about tweets here, of course. I'm also talking about a generalist position on really any marketing material. So anything, any place where you're trying to raise people's awareness of your products and services in the marketplace counts as marketing. And the vast majority of software developers take the approach of adopting a very generalist stance in their marketing on their website and their social media, business cards, so on and so forth. So I would urge you to consider this story next time you are revising your marketing materials because you don't want to exude the stench of desperation because that is going to repel prospects from you. That is going to decrease the number of leads you get, not increase, which is the irony because you think it's going to increase the number of leads. And the other thing is, you know, this is sort of I can't do a podcast episode without mentioning that a generalist position is going to have a commoditizing effect on your business, which means that you are not going to be able to charge higher fees. If you specialize, which I would consider to be more or less the opposite of being a generalist, if you specialize in a horizontal or vertical, they were automatically going to differentiate yourself from the competition and be able to charge a premium price because you're essentially creating a smaller and smaller pool from which your prospects can choose. So you decrease the number of competitors and you don't have to compete on price because you have there's something different about you that makes you unique. But that's not really that this person's problem. This person is desperate for work and they're trying to come up with a way to quickly initiate a bunch of sales conversations. And I think that if he had taken the approach of picking a target vertical and trying to trigger a Rolodex moment in the minds of the readers, he would have been a lot better off. That's it for today. I'm Jonathan Stark, and this is Ditching Hourly. Thanks for listening. The next time someone asks you for your hourly rate, tell them that you do not have one. To learn what to say next, visit valuepricingbootcamp.com to sign up for my free email course. Again, that URL is valuepricingbootcamp.com. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time, or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space, or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to jonathanstark.com slash call. C-A-L-L. That URL again is jonathanstark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.